Music Box | Bjork

Mike Newmark Arts Editor

Bjork
Volta
[Atlantic]

Like few others in her field, Björk has been christened by her admirers (are there any people left on Earth who don’t admire her?) as an “artist,” rather than merely a musician. Part of this comes from her bottomless well of creativity and her refusal to conform; she does whatever she wants however she wants to do it, and the major labels she graces back off and just assume that she’ll drop jaws and rack up record sales. But it also has to do with her protean self-image, how she reinvents herself on each album and how they ostensibly provide keyholes to some part of her personality. Björk has never been particularly explicit about what she expects listeners to gain from her music, which keeps us guessing in awe and ensures that Björk largely remains a mystery.

Volta is a different story, because we know exactly what it’s about: rhythms and unity. It’s logical that she’d want to go out of her way to highlight percussion after recording an album (Medúlla) almost entirely devoid of it, and intricate beats have always been her stock in trade anyhow. And though Volta is no more rhythmic than Debut, Post, or Homogenic, the drums do pop up here in interesting ways. The two Timbaland-produced tracks, “Earth Intruders” and “Innocence,” are incredible; the former employs free-jazz percussionist Chris Corsano banging out a tribal, extraterrestrial stomp, and the latter features the clipped grunts and alien effects we expect from such a forward-looking producer. Drums are actually the best thing on “Declare Independence,” which places virtuosic Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale behind the skins; oddly enough, it’s Björk herself who kills the song dead, bleating the dumb rallying cry “Declare independence / Don’t let them do that to you” while sounding more like Zack de la Rocha than one might wish.

“Unity”—as in, “we are all one,” a sentiment that Björk has expressed in multiple interviews—is a harder sell, and if I had to hazard a guess I would say that Volta is more about strength, about standing up and “declaring independence,” as it were. The one thing these tracks do have in common (with the curious exception of two) is their forcefulness, resulting in Björk’s loudest and least subtle release—her own late-career version of Mouse on Mars’ Varcharz. Marching is one of the more noticeable of Volta’s motifs, both in the percussion and the stone-hard horns on “The Dull Flame of Desire,” and “Vertebrae by Vertebrae,” and for Björk it apparently symbolizes a people moving as one toward a common goal. Which contradicts her negative opinion of the war in Iraq (a subject about which she is quite vocal), but whatever.

Ultimately, however, Volta is defined more by its intra-album diversity than its homogeneity. You can probably imagine what that means: flashes of brilliance, marred somewhat by inconsistency. Volta begins with a bang on “Earth Intruders,” dips into some horn-driven murk, then bounces back up to the beat-heavy “Innocence” before going strangely quiet again. By the time we hit the halfway mark, we’re tired of the seasick album pacing and we don’t want to continue to try to make sense of it, because there’s precious little to make sense of.

In terms of quality, Volta runs the gamut from seriously excellent (the tenser-than-hell slow burn “Vertebrae by Vertebrae”) to seriously bad (“My Juvenile,” a cringe-inducing vocal collaboration with Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons). And for an artist this poised to deliver the goods every time out, bad songs aren’t just disappointing, they’re not even an option. Volta hits far more than it misses, to be sure, but 10 songs in 45 minutes doesn’t leave much room for damage control if you happen to fall flat on your face, as she does. It can also be argued that Volta isn’t really an evolution for Björk the way her other albums have been, as most of these tracks touch upon something she’s previously explored; “Wanderlust” is Post, “Pneumonia” is Homogenic, “I See Who You Are” is Vespertine, and so on.

Raising standards is a real pain for brilliant musicians (just ask Boards of Canada), and Björk’s are inhumanly high, so perhaps I’m being a little harsh when I say that Volta isn’t as impressive as I hoped it would be. But it’s not because of a few flops sitting among a mostly high-quality environment. When all is said and done, it’s because Björk has willfully blown away a huge portion of her mystery with a stick of dynamite, and I’ve now seen more of Björk than I ever wanted to see.